


Countdown

by incoffeespoons



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Childhood, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Reichenbach-Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 18:42:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1136104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incoffeespoons/pseuds/incoffeespoons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(You imagine the two of you looking at each other from separate windows. Your reflection and what was beyond would merge and if either of you raised a hand, you would not be able to tell if the other person was waving back.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Countdown

10.

You remember being ten: cold air of playgrounds, children with damp bitten jumper cuffs, the way everyone would act when a cat climbed over the school fence at break. The way they would remember rules of games and then look at the ground like they were afraid of being angry and say “It’s my game,” whenever someone did not remember, and send them sulking over green-tufted playing fields. 

You remember once when it was your game, everyone being someone from a teatime TV programme, and when it was your turn to say “It’s my game,” to remind them, you didn’t look at the ground, your small feet or the hem of your grey trousers.  
It was funny, you remember, how after you watched the sulker’s retreating back, everyone carried on, dividing the roles again. There was a small argument between two girls who wanted to be the big sister, but no one else left.

 

9.

It must have been during a time when you were joining in, the month-long blurs that cut up time then. Smudged windows, falls of ash from a small fire, quickly swept up. The games did not change much. You remember what you used to do in-between more. The walking around the boundary of the school, or the careful climbing of the small cluster of trees near the main gate, sometimes sitting on the bank of the playing field that girls rolled down in summer. The occasional guardsman of a new pupil.

Sometimes you would see a kid with the red face and diamond eyes of a badly-ended game, sometimes you would follow them until they threw stones or fresh, dark swearwords, recently learnt. Sometimes, if it was early or a bad day, raining or everyone too loud, you would go and find an adult, show them the scratches from the stone or a whispered repeat of the curse words, soft in your mouth like a gift.

 

8.

(The sun is in your eyes, white gold. You think of new houses without curtains, eyes like windows, brown, or blue.)

 

7.

“Excuse me but I think Sam’s upset. He’s on his own. I tried to help, but he’s cut my hand.”

The cut – a small scratch from a tangle of small, angry fingers, prised wider by your own until a small drop of red curled over the curve of your knuckle.

 

6.

Later, when there were more and better places to hide than trees, and more people. You remember: the humiliation of raising a hand in a hot classroom, the crush of corridors where people did not walk on the right even though they had been told to, the disgust of opening a library book to find Biro annotations from previous borrowers, rude drawings in the margin, greasy fingerprints on the waxed cover. The string of adolescents that spoke to you, entering one month, smiling, and leaving it not, back to their old friends, a full table for lunch in the canteen.

You before you were you, you think.

 

5.

(If the sun is in your eyes then the cold is in your lungs, and above him talking is the hum and buzz of traffic and people and construction. You imagine turning the world down, the twist of a dial, and for a second it works again, you think of windows, but it’s only a second.)

 

4.

You used to think if you stood too close to a deep river or at the edge of those large bridges that go over the motorway, you would jump, as much as you could call it jumping – not the calm pliancy of falling, but a deliberate act from your body but not your mind. A minor surprise, like going into a room you thought was empty but in fact had someone sat inside.

 

3.

You would think they would stop bringing you the new kids after a while, that the playground monitor wearing a bag around their waist would not gesture you over and tell you how responsible you are, and how scary it must be for someone on their own, in a place they did not know. You would help them settle in, they said. The small boy or girl in a red sweater unfaded from a school year’s washing, messing with their hands. What were you supposed to do with such unwanted gifts? You made up a name to tell them, and looked at them, waiting to see if they knew you were lying. They kicked at the ground in patent shoes and wandered off to where all the noise was.

 

2.

(You imagine the two of you looking at each other from separate windows. Your reflection and what was beyond would merge and if either of you raised a hand, you would not be able to tell if the other person was waving back.)

 

1.

(You raise your hand and instead of raising his he steps back, saying something you don’t register, but you know that if you were somewhere else, if the windows were there, then you would be right.)


End file.
